Lazy Friday

Today has been fairly dull. I recovered from Brad’s party (see bottom of post), went to the gym, and then spent some time doing a bit of planning for an upcoming trek beyond the city and looking for possible jobs for my return to Chapel Hill. Now I am getting ready to head out to meet Ashley Swinnerton and Phil Chernyak to do a High Line/dinner trek downtown. However, I promised a recap of yesterday so here we go:

A representative from the registration department (my department) spoke to the interns yesterday. Registration isn’t really a “sexy” department but the museum could not function without it. Alongside maintaining/caring for/keeping track of the collection and loans registration also is in charge of getting works into and out of the museum (which can be tricky) and dealing with the odd logistics of contemporary art works. For instance, registration must maintain the climate integrity of status quo of the galleries but that can be hard to do when artists are working with odd materials such as food. Seth, the representative, actually made registration interesting and reminded me that even though my work isn’t the most exciting job in the museum it is integral to the operation and mission of the museum.

After the registration presentation, Chrissie Iles, the Whitney curator of the Dan Graham retrospective (it was at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and will be going to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis so there are curators at those institutions as well) gave us a tour of the exhibit; it was immensely helpful. Graham doesn’t like to use the word “performance,” a term that could easily be used to describe how visitors interact with his works. Rather he prefers terms such as experience and is aware that the works are not fucntional until there are people within/among/around them. A lot of what Iles said I’d learned from Graham at his talk, but it was still helpful to hear her explanation, particularly in terms of his early, extremely conceptual work, which is very based in language and advertisements. Regardless, the more time I spend in the exhibition the more I enjoy it, so if you’re in New York City you should absolutely pay it a visit!

You all know about the rest of my day: cookie hunt, exhausting walk, rain, shopping, gym. After a few hours of recovery I headed to the West Village to celebrate Brad’s twenty-fifth birthday. Just the first of many twenty-fifth birthdays over the next year, including my own, good lord. I left the party around 2:00. I won’t say anything except that it was fun, and here are a few pictures of the quasi-debauchery: